Backup and recovery software products are crucial for enterprise level network clients. Customers rely on backup systems to efficiently back up and recover data in the event of user error, data loss, system outages, hardware failure, or other catastrophic events to allow business applications to remain in service or quickly come back up to service after a failure condition or an outage. The advent of virtualization technology has led to the increased use of virtual machines as data storage targets. Virtual machine (VM) disaster recovery systems using hypervisor platforms, such as a vSphere or ESXi platform from VMware or Hyper-V from Microsoft, among others, have been developed to provide recovery from multiple disaster scenarios including total site loss. The immense amount of data involved in large-scale (e.g., municipal, enterprise, etc.) level backup applications and the number of different potential problems that exist means that backup performance and reliable operation is a critical concern for system administrators.
In a backup system, a backup proxy is a component responsible retrieving and transferring VM data. During backup or replication activities, the backup proxy retrieves VM data from the source datastore, processes it and transfers to the destination storage. The backup proxy is also used to write data back to the source datastore during full VM restore and VM disk restore. In general, the backup proxy must provide an optimal route for VM data traffic and configuring a backup proxy requires analysis of the connection between the source datastore and the backup proxy.
In present backup systems, proxy nodes are typically associated with the backup application proxy server and are therefore tightly coupled together. Each backup application can have many proxy servers associated with it, which themselves might be associated with same hypervisor or a different hypervisor. The association of proxy nodes to the proxy server is mainly due to the fact that during the backup operation, the system needs more parallel sessions and since a proxy server has a certain limitation, it needs associated proxy nodes to help and offload its work.
The tight coupling or association of proxy nodes to specific proxy servers often results in non-optimal use of system resources since some proxy nodes may go unused. Thus, certain tightly coupled proxy servers may sit idle even during periods when those resources may be better used for other purposes. Also, if the backup environment has more than one proxy server then each proxy server needs to have the same number (x) of proxy nodes in order to achieve desired concurrency. Furthermore, proxy node assignment is often a manual user-specified process that adds overhead and imposes a tedious task for users.
What is needed is a backup system that that provides greater use of available resources and provides automated proxy selection, thus requiring no manual association of proxy node simplify user involvement and enhance the total customer experience.
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